Silver-Screen Heroism
The Turkish cinema industry made a great
start for 2006 with "Kurtlar Vadisi Irak." This issue of the Bilkent
News will appear on February 14, so a large number of you will have seen
the film by the time you read this. I'm not sure, though, how many of
you will be able to perceive the movie "as a movie" in the face of the
large number of comments, both positive and negative, that have already
been made about it.
Even this soon after its
release, the movie has attracted a notably large audience and also a
great deal of attention from the media--it got a reaction from the
American press only a few days after its premiere.
Newspapers such as the Boston Globe and the New York Times claimed that
"Kurtlar Vadisi Irak" "feeds off the increasingly negative feelings many
Turks harbor toward" the United States. And even after the film is no
longer current news in Turkey, a ripple effect will continue outside our
borders: according to the Boston Globe, the movie is set to be shown in
the United States, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Britain, Denmark,
Russia, Egypt, Syria and Australia. Maybe even the producers themselves
did not expect their voice to have such a huge echo, but, on the other
hand, maybe they did.
So, this might be the
first time in the history of the Turkish cinema industry that a
political message is being spread by a popular movie. Now we're going to
learn a new thing about telling stories to the world: when you try to
use a story to spread a message, it can work two ways. You might attract
attention to an issue, but this attention in turn takes the issue into
the realm of popular culture and so demolishes its place in reality.
Some people might see
this movie as a silver-screen declaration about the alleged actions of
the United States in Iraq. But won't this cause the events to become a
part of the screen rather of the deserts of Iraq?
Right now, since the
movie is so new, it seems like "Kurtlar Vadisi Irak" has made people
think more about what has happened and what is happening in Iraq. But in
order to believe in its message, you have to accept the things you see
on the screen as reality. At this point, the demolition of the real
starts. When a person accepts what he/she sees on the screen as the "real,"
the real actions themselves change into light-games. Once you encounter
the events on the screen, there's no turning back. All your concern
about what's happening in Iraq will be gone when you see Charlize Theron
as Aeon Flux instead of Billy Zane as CIA agent Sam Marshall. Soon, your
new hero will be Selene of "Underworld Evolution" instead of Polat
Alemdar.
İsmail O. Postalcıoğlu (POLS/III)
ismail_orhan@yahoo.com
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